“Throwing Off the European” 225
very personal reflection on how [his first visit to Syria and Palestine] changed
Pickthall in spiritual, cultural and intellectual ways”. “[This] idea of the (white)
Briton who enters into and becomes a part of the world of the Arab other
is both scandalous and becomes a guarantor of commercial success. Titilla-
tion about crossing over – the pleasure of being mistaken for the ‘other’ – is
certainly a popular publishing ploy and an exciting idea for British readers,
perhaps even today”. Pickthall has managed to adopt the standpoint or the
position “of the outsider on the inside, or the Westerner with the privileged
view from the interior of the East” that is, according to Long, “clearly the basis
for the modern artist’s aesthetic” in the sense that “the modernist/modern art-
ist stands on the periphery, isolated in the midst of modern life, and from this
position – this standpoint – is able to see and represent modernity in ways that
defy the efforts and abject consciousness of those who live within the rhythms
of modern everyday life”.25 So indeed in many ways we might want to view
Marmaduke Pickthall’s Oriental Encounters not as Edward Said read works
by other Western writers on the East, but as a work challenging the ortho-
dox stereotypic European vision of Arabia and its inhabitants; and as a book
embodying a sense of modernism in its gaze back upon aspects of the late
nineteenth-century Arabia from 1917 as the world writhes in the horrors of war.
That scene in “My Countryman” then develops as “the Frank” even refuses to
pay the meagre five piastres which Suleyman has negotiated with the elder of
the village for taking water from the well. The missionary maintains the water
is “the gift of God” and so should be free. When Pickthall steps in to explain that
water in the desert is a precious commodity and so one deserving of a price, his
nationality is recognised: “What! Are you English?” (94) exclaims the mission-
ary as he stares at that “semi-native garb” which constitutes the young English-
man’s clothes. It is a moment of delightful tension: two Englishman meet in
the Syria desert far from any other European presence. Queen Victoria reigns.
Yet this is no Stanley-Livingstone moment. Even if it is another extraordinary
encounter between Englishmen on the edges of the British Empire, these two
Englishmen share little common ground. There is not even anything of the
serene reservation embodied in those famous first words, “Dr Livingstone,
I presume”. Instead, Pickthall’s Englishmen hardly see the commonality of their
nationhood. “Are you English?” are their first words together. Pickthall agrees
to join the Frank for supper, for the ties of English identity are hard to break.
Suleyman and Rashid are both annoyed at the decision, “jealous of the Frank,
whom they regarded as an enemy, and feared lest he should turn my mind
25 Andrew C. Long, Reading Arabia: British Orientalism in the Age of Mass Publication, 1880–
1930 (Syracuse, New York: Syracuse University Press, 2014), 137.